FINALLY

I really, really did not enjoy Vincent and Theo:  The Van Gogh Brothers.  When it was chosen to be read by the group that follow for possible Printz winners I tried and tried and tried.  And then I gave up.  Then it was chosen by the group I follow for Newbery winners and I knew I had to try again. But man, man, I didn't like this book at all.  I hated that it was written in the present tense.  I just hated it. Thing is, I thought I would love it!  I loved my art history minor is college.  I love post-impressionism.  While Van Gogh is not in my top five favorite artists, he is, for sure, in the top ten.  I love apocryphal stories about him, especially about his time spent living with Gauguin.  Gauguin was a wild dude!  But this book was just one of those that didn't do it for me.  At all.  While I loved Charles and Emma:  the Darwin's Leap of Faith, loved, loved, loved it, this one by Deborah Heiligman just made me struggle.    Interestingly enough I don't remember if CAE was written in the present tense or not!  I am going to see if I can find out...hang on...no, from what I can see from excerpts provided online, the book isn't written in the present tense.  Why was most of this one?  I swear, if I had been written in the past, I would have liked it to a four-star maybe!  I bet I would have. In any case, I am glad I finished it.  The book is REALLY well researched and so it seems to me that Vincent van Gogh was as troubled as many stories show him to be, and even more so.  But man, the tense thing just drove me crazy!  If you don't mind a story mostly written in the present tense, you might really like it though!

WW2 Weekend

This weekend I went to see The Innocents, which was a very, very good film.  I also finished the book Girl in the Blue Dress which was an even better book.  A really, really great book.  Will it win the Printz?  It's on the Printz Watch-List of that little group I follow on goodreads.  That's why I read it.  Again, I am thankful that I am following that group because I tend to be a slacker when it comes to books.  There is one part in GINBD where the main character talks how some people like to read the end of a book to make sure that "everyone turns out okay" and her boyfriend mocks this.  I know what that is like!  As I have shared that I have done that sometimes.  In a book based on a real-life horror like WW2, however, there is no need to read to the end.  I mean, how does anything really "turn out okay" in the face of such hell.
This book is set in Amsterdam in 1943 and tells the story of a young girl who stumbles into the resistance movement when she is ask to help find the whereabouts of a young woman who was previously being hidden from the Nazis.  The book does a little back and forth in time, and it is done very well and the past sheds light on to the present story being told.  The whole book is just...masterful.  Yes, that is the right word.  At the end of the audio there is an interview with the author, Monica Hesse, who is a very accomplished journalist and has proven that she is also an incredible writer of historical fiction.  Many, many thumbs up.